Macbeth, to my mind, is a play that shouldn’t work but does. It’s quite clear that, politically, it served to flatter James I’s ego in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. So, we would expect it to be propaganda and nothing more. Yet what we get is an unforgettable work of art, alarming in its intensity; Duncan may rest in peace, but the dagger is still in us when we’ve left the theatre.
These thoughts have been uppermost in my mind since I went to see The Tragedy of Macbeth, a new film adaptation that, if anything, has remarkable visuals. I was thus pleased to find Larissa Szporluk’s “tRaffiC WiTH MacBeTh” in our archives. Originally published in 2011, in our forty-ninth issue, this poem—short and sweet, just like the play in its title—jabs at the reader with blood-red music. I hope you enjoy it.
tRaffiC WiTH MacBeTh
Larissa Szporluk
In the eye-water
of the newborn lamb,
a blood clot.
No, a fire-red canoe
heading over the falls
of excess.
And those who blew around
before ceasing to be
in a garden of roses,
and those who came down,
in a rosy disguise,
with a thud,
afraid of, afraid of —
the heft
of nothing to love.
